Plant-based Diet

1369: 

This crude, human-advantaged world we live in wasn’t what Mum and Dad expected for their family - surely the world had learnt its lesson, about violence and war?

         

But it was never going to be that simple.  The war on animals was continuing, and about to get worse.  ‘That’ war, that bomb, that cage - I suppose each had to come into being, so that humans could see good reasons for finding alternatives.  The lesson couldn’t have been clearer. The Second World War was a true performance of violence.  This war, and The Bomb that appeared in the finale, were supposed to revolt us so much that we’d say, “Stop.  We must find a better way to live together”, but intentions are ephemeral.  The resolve to end violence gave way to the wonders of post war washing machines and TV, disposable income and a generally more modern world, skating on the thin ice of hope.  We hoped that war was a thing of the past, as was hunger.

Food became plentiful and cheap.  The insecure human, with a dread of hunger, ignored the fact that war-violence on humans had connections with food-violence on animals – we took it for granted that we had always used violence to feed ourselves, especially since our primary foods always came from animals.  And now, with new farming methods, there was a promise of food security, so we took up these 'improvements' with enthusiasm.  And because we were, and still are, almost entirely human-centred, we've been able to accept the cruelty of the technologies of animal husbandry, and even come to accept that they've reached diabolical levels.

In terms of food, it seems we humans always get what we want, if only because we are used to using violence.  We’ve never tried any other way.  When it comes to our favourite animal foods, we are prepared to enslave and then kill them, and then eat them.  Here are animals.  They’re simply here for humans to make use of.  

But instinctively we suspect this is all wrong.  This is the big ethical question which we must now face.  But most people still say, “We’re not ready for it”!  And you can see why.  Peoples’ attention is directed elsewhere, towards other matters, in fact ANY matter that will divert them from this bete-noire, this matter of animal slavery.

The whole world is currently focused on climate change.  It’s made us sit up and take notice, but not much more.  We still believe in serendipity, that it will all work out.  We talk about it a lot but don’t do much.  It's the same with ‘going vegan’ - it's a nice idea but we just can’t get it together, because we keep imagining the inconvenience!  Our own lifestyles would be screwed up overnight, and as for our personal relationships!  And then, what about our own habits-of-addiction?

Acting for the greater good is also a nice idea, but one is reluctant to ‘make a start’ when one’s mates won’t.  Whether we are proactively working to save the environment, feeding the hungry, boycotting animal products, we’d rather say, “You first, me next”!  So we wait.

         

Any excuse will do.  We wait for vegan foods to come down in price, so it’s cheap enough to consider buying.  We wait.

But we know that there must be a way of supplying food without causing chaos and misery to so many sentient beings.

Vegans can do one thing better than omnivores, they can look at the faces of the animals.  We can look them in the eye.  If you take up a plant-based diet the experience is so lovely that you almost scream at the lost time spent dithering.  It’s something that gets more important as you grow older.  Plant-based foods fix up most health problems, but that’s quite incidental.